


Mother's Little Helper

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Family, Family Rydell, Foreshadowing, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-23
Updated: 2009-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rydell family life is ... difficult. Danny does what he can to help the people he loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother's Little Helper

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Ivy, Christmas, 2006.

"Danny?"

Dan's got one foot on the upper staircase, but the plaintive note in Sam's voice makes him step back down. He drops his schoolbag on the floor and sticks his head around Sam's bedroom door.

"What?" He tries not to snap. He seems to spend an awful lot of his life helping Sam out, defending him from bullies, explaining what he's trying to say, calming down strangers and elderly relatives who find Sam's candour offensive. Hiding Sam's latest disaster from their father. Sam can't help it. He's brilliant – he's a genius, everyone says so, and their mother says that means that something has to give. So he's also clumsy and tactless and terminally shy, and it's Dan's job to make sure that his life's not unbearable.

Sam looks up wide-eyed from his new home computer, the amazing first-night-of-Chanukah gift that Dan does _not_ envy him, not at all. "I'm hungry." He's obviously trying hard not to whine, but he's not being entirely successful.

Sam is twelve and, really, old enough to fix himself a snack, but he's been banned from the kitchen after an experiment with the microwave and a sheet of tinfoil. And the other experiment with a block of rock salt and the gas burner on the stove. And the _other_ experiment, the one they'd eventually found at the back of the fridge three weeks later.

_Permanently_ banned.

Dan glances back toward the stairs. "Where's Mom?"

"She's asleep," Sam tells him. "I guess she's got one of her headaches. I tried to wake her, but she just rolled over."

Dan's stomach sinks, but he's careful to sound calm. "Yeah," he says. "Okay. I'll take care of it, Sammy." He's got a book report due in the morning, but that's okay; he read _The Ice-Cream War_ when he was ten, he still remembers enough to give it a good shot. Besides, he knows exactly what Ms Matheson will be expecting him to say. He could probably write the thing in his sleep. "Give me a couple minutes, okay?"

He scoops up his bag and heads upstairs, stops off in his room to ditch his schoolwork, carries on along the hallway until he comes to his mother's door. He waits outside for a moment, listening to the silence; knocks, waits a moment longer, then turns the handle and slips inside.

The room's dark; all he can see of his mother is her hair, long and tangled on the pillow. The room's a little stale, but he's known it be worse: there's the scent of bath salts, talc, perfume in the air, so at least she's been out of bed today, she's bathed. And there's no smell of vomit. That's good. That's … better than good. Still, he slides her sleeping pills off the bedside table, twists off the lid and counts them out into his hand. She just filled her prescription two days ago, and there are twenty six pills left. Two days, two pills a day. It's okay. He can file his emergency contingency plans away for another day, another day that he hopes will never come.

(He'd been eight years old when he'd found her, that other time; he'd barely known how to use the telephone. She's never thanked him. No-one's even ever spoken of it; it's been dismissed, swept under the carpet, forgotten. Only Dan never can forget.)

Still, he can't help but touch her shoulder, just for reassurance: to be sure her skin's warm, to listen a little closer for the sound of her breathing.

Her eyes open. She blinks at him, sleepy, then smiles.

"Hey, Mama," he whispers. "You okay?"

"M'm," she murmurs, and burrows her head back into the pillow. "Mama's just a little tired, sweetheart. Be a good boy and let her sleep, h'm?"

"Sure, Mama," he tells her, and leans over to brush his lips against the soft, powdery skin of her cheek. He closes the door behind him as quietly as he came in, and tiptoes back down the stairs.

Sam's adjusting settings on the monitor. He glances over his shoulder, brown eyes visibly anxious behind thick lenses. "Is she going to get up?"

"Maybe later," Dan … doesn't exactly lie; maybe she will, maybe she won't. _Maybe_ is true enough, as far as it goes. "I'll fix you something." He carries on down to the kitchen to investigate the possibilities.

When he'd been a kid himself and had wanted a snack, his mom used to fix him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – "The reliable standby," she'd called them. He finds peanut butter in the first cupboard he checks, but no jelly. There's a jar in the refrigerator labelled _'confiture'_ in his grandmother's scratchy handwriting, but there's a film of mould across the top. He wonders if it's still good underneath, and tries some with a finger. It _tastes_ okay, so … But an investigation of the bread crock reveals that there's nothing to spread it on in any case, so the whole sandwich proposition has to be rethought.

The storeroom's stocked, at least; there's canned goods. In the event of nuclear holocaust, they'll be able to eat, if they're not reduced instantly to ashes. That's a comfort. Dan picks out a can of Campbell's soup and heats it, adds some dry crackers and a wedge of cheese, loads it all onto a tray and carries it up to Sam's room. Sam's _inside_ the computer now, serious-faced and absorbed, doing something – Dan daren't ask what – with a screwdriver. Dan sets the tray down, steps over Sam's feet, reaches over to the socket and pulls out the plug. Sam's head pops up.

"Hey!" he says, indignant.

"Sam, if you fry yourself doing … whatever it is you're doing, it's not going to be because I didn't stop you." Although frying himself might be preferable to facing their father, if he ever finds out. Dan knows, because he overheard the row their parents had about it, how much that computer cost. He picks up the tray again and offers it invitingly. "Here. Food. Sit down, shut up, eat."

"Thank you," Sam says meekly, and does what he's told, more or less although, Sam being Sam, he can't do only one thing at a time. He picks up a paperback from the floor as he sits, and holds it in one hand while he spoons up soup with the other, which means he ends up wearing more soup than he swallows. Dan lets it go, merely making a mental note to get Sam into a clean shirt before either parent sees him. Which reminds him …

"Is Dad home tonight?"

Sam nods his head, and soup slops a little further. Dan hadn't thought to bring up napkins. He pulls a Kleenex out of his jeans pocket and swabs futilely at the orange stain on the carpet.

Okay. Change of shirt. Move furniture. What else?

"He hasn't phoned," Sam says, in a spray of crumbs around a mouthful of cracker, "so I guess so."

Shit. It's only been a couple of weeks since Mom's last bad day, and Dad went nuts then. Dan flinches at the memory; he doesn't dare imagine what's going to happen when his father gets home and finds Mom in bed, the house in a mess, and no dinner on the table.

He sighs. "Yeah. All right. You okay now, Sam?"

Sam's put down the tray and crawled back into his computer, clearly hell-bent on improving its design and performance or to die trying. Maybe both. He flaps a hand absently, his brother already forgotten. Dan watches him for a moment – his crazy, brilliant baby brother never ceases to amaze and fascinate him – then takes the tray and heads back down to the kitchen.

He loads Sam's bowl and spoon into the dishwasher, and is about to climb the stairs for what seems like the hundredth time since he got home and, god, sometimes he wishes they lived in a smaller house, when he's struck by a thought. If he can cook for Sam, then why can't he do it for the rest of the family?

Especially if it'll head off trouble at the pass. Dan's used to their father, his cold, indifferent sarcasm and his occasional flares of white-hot rage – they all are – but what his father doesn't know isn't going to hurt anyone.

And Dan is prepared to do almost anything to keep the people he loves from being hurt.

He checks the storeroom again, opens up the big chest freezer and checks inside. Raw, one cut of meat looks pretty much like another to him, but he pulls out a joint (_joint!_ he thinks, with what even he has to admit is a pretty juvenile mental snigger) at random. It's frozen solid, so he unwraps it and sticks it in the microwave to thaw while he tries to decide what to do with it.

His mom's never been much of a cook. They used to eat out a lot, though not any more, not since the time that Sam had politely declined a peppermint from the bowl by the cash register at what had been their favourite restaurant, informing the world in a small, clear voice that research had shown that open bowls of snacks were inevitably contaminated with urine. So now, really, the only time the family sits down to a decent meal is when _Grandmère_ stays with them. But she hasn't been here for months, not since the last time, when the row she'd had with her son-in-law had almost rocked the old house off its foundations. There's a whole shelf of recipe books though, most of them unopened. Dan runs a finger along the spines, picks one with the word 'Easy' in the title.

He reads the first recipe he finds and tosses the book aside in disgust. He's not sure how you're meant to cook a potroast, but he's pretty sure that sprinkling it with a packet soup mix isn't how they do it at the Rainbow Room.

He tries again; this seems more promising. Potatoes, carrots, leeks – he's not cooking leeks, he knows Sam won't eat them (last time he'd been given them he'd claimed they tasted like snot, and hadn't _that_ gone down well at the dinner table) – and … what the hell are shallots? Dan flicks back a page to see if there's a picture.

Oh. _Onions_. For fucksake, why couldn't they just say that? Okay. Mystery solved, the rest of it looks pretty easy. Dice, slice, chop, mix, heat. Nothing to it.

It takes longer than he'd expected, but that's because it's never occurred to his mother to keep her kitchen in any sort of order; looking for herbs, he finds marjoram in one cabinet, thyme in another, and if there's a bayleaf anywhere in the house then he never does find it at all. The black pepper's in a drawer, and the flour's on a shelf so high that Dan has to pull over the table and stand on it to reach. But, finally, he thinks he's accomplished something: the meat's in a casserole dish, the vegetables under and over and around it. He bastes it with stock he's made up from a bouillon cube, covers it with a lid, and then realises he should have set the oven to heat while he was doing the preparation.

Damn. He thinks he's starting to understand how the cliché of the frazzled housewife seeking refuge in a gin bottle came about. He fumbles about in his pocket, although he knows it's empty; he smoked the last of his stash down at the end of the football field that afternoon, along with Nicky and Greg. He doesn't dare help himself from his parents' liquor cabinet, not if his dad's going to be home. He shrugs. He can get by. He'll score a dime bag tomorrow lunchtime, he's good till then.

Okay. The oven's hot. He slides the dish onto the middle shelf, sets the timer, and stands back. He's not quite sure he dare walk away and leave it, but what's he going to do in the damn kitchen for two hours?

He glances around himself, and realises that he already knows the answer.

When the timer rings, the kitchen's unrecognisable: the cupboards are organised, the surfaces shine, the pad stuck to the refrigerator has two pages filled with notes of basic supplies that need to be restocked. Dan's sitting on the kitchen table, checking out his handiwork with a mixture of pride at his achievement and a very real fear for his masculinity, when his father comes through the door.

"Could you sit on a chair, please, Dan, like a civilised human being?" is all he says as he passes through. Dan barely spares him a glance in return. They share living space, the two of them; that's all. An armed and mutual truce is the best they can hope for.

There are footsteps on the staircase; not Sam's clattering, scatterbrained run, not his father's heavy tread, but light steps, high heels clacking. Dan smiles in relief. His mom's out of bed and, it sounds like, dressed. If she's thought to pull the covers straight, his dad need never know.

Sure enough, there she is, coming through the door, light and graceful and elegant, stepping like a ballerina. She's dressed in white jeans and a pink blouse, her hair's scooped into a French knot at the back of her neck, and she's even wearing _Grandmère_'s pearl necklet and earrings. She's beautiful and dear and perfect, and Dan's gut twists with love and anguish and fear for her. Milton Liebowitz's mother used to cry for hours on end, day after day after day, until finally Milton's father had the doctors take her away. She's in the hospital now, and no-one knows if she'll ever come home. Milton jokes about it, calls her crazy, talks about visiting her in the cuckoo factory, but if he thinks anyone else might have said a word against her, he'll knock their teeth down their throat.

Dan will do anything – _absolutely_ anything – not to end up like Milton.

"Something smells _marvellous!_" his mother says brightly, and peeks into the oven. Her forehead crinkles, and Dan watches in dismay. "Oh, darling – you shouldn't have used that dish, that's the Spode."

Dan scuffs a sneaker across the tile. "Sorry, Mom. I didn't know the dishes were special."

"Well …" She turns back to him, and smiles again. "I guess you weren't to know. But this is wonderful, Danny. Did you do this all yourself?"

He nods, and she hugs him, and his heart sings.

"We won't tell your father," she whispers into his ear. "This can be our little secret. What do you think?"

Dan nods: _yes!_ The last thing he wants is his _father_ knowing about any of this.

And at dinner that night, as Jacob Rydell takes a bite of potroast and says, surprised, "Hey, this isn't bad!", Dan's mother winks across at him, and they share the private smile of conspirators against the world.

***


End file.
